Act III, scene iii

Act III, scene iii

Act III, scene iii

Act III, scene iii

Act III, scene iii

Act III, scene iii

Summary: Act III, scene iii

Elsewhere in the castle, King Claudius speaks to Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. Badly shaken by the play and now considering Hamlet’s
madness to be dangerous, Claudius asks the pair to escort Hamlet
on a voyage to England and to depart immediately. They agree and
leave to make preparations. Polonius enters and reminds the king
of his plan to hide in Gertrude’s room and observe Hamlet’s confrontation
with her. He promises to tell Claudius all that he learns. When
Polonius leaves, the king is alone, and he immediately expresses
his guilt and grief over his sin. A brother’s murder, he says, is
the oldest sin and “hath the primal eldest curse upon’t” (III.iii.37). He
longs to ask for forgiveness, but says that he is unprepared to give
up that which he gained by committing the murder, namely, the crown
and the queen. He falls to his knees and begins to pray.

Hamlet slips quietly into the room and steels himself
to kill the unseeing Claudius. But suddenly it occurs to him that
if he kills Claudius while he is praying, he will end the king’s
life at the moment when he was seeking forgiveness for his sins,
sending Claudius’s soul to heaven. This is hardly an adequate revenge,
Hamlet thinks, especially since Claudius, by killing Hamlet’s father
before he had time to make his last confession, ensured that his
brother would not go to heaven. Hamlet decides to wait, resolving
to kill Claudius when the king is sinning—when he is either drunk,
angry, or lustful. He leaves. Claudius rises and declares that he
has been unable to pray sincerely: “My words fly up, my thoughts
remain below” (III.iii.96).

Analysis

Thus conscience does make cowards of
us all;And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;And enterprises of great pith and moment,With this regard, their currents turn awry,And lose the name of action.

In Act III, scene iii, Hamlet finally seems ready to put
his desire for revenge into action. He is satisfied that the play
has proven his uncle’s guilt. When Claudius prays, the audience
is given real certainty that Claudius murdered his brother: a full,
spontaneous confession, even though nobody else hears it. This only
heightens our sense that the climax of the play is due to arrive.
But Hamlet waits.

On the surface, it seems that he waits because he wants
a more radical revenge. Critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge
have been horrified by Hamlet’s words here—he completely oversteps
the bounds of Christian morality in trying to damn his opponent’s
soul as well as kill him. But apart from this ultraviolent posturing,
Hamlet has once again avoided the imperative to act by involving
himself in a problem of knowledge. Now that he’s satisfied that
he knows Claudius’s guilt, he wants to know that his punishment
will be sufficient. It may have been difficult to prove the former,
but how can Hamlet ever hope to know the fate of Claudius’s immortal
soul?

Hamlet poses his desire to damn Claudius as a matter of
fairness: his own father was killed without having cleansed his
soul by praying or confessing, so why should his murderer be given
that chance? But Hamlet is forced to admit that he doesn’t really
know what happened to his father, remarking “how his audit stands,
who knows, save heaven?” (III.iv.82). The
most he can say is that “in our circumstance and course of thought
/ ’Tis heavy with him” (III.iv.83–84). The
Norton Shakespeare paraphrases “in our circumstance and course of
thought” as “in our indirect and limited way of knowing on earth.”
Having proven his uncle’s guilt to himself, against all odds, Hamlet
suddenly finds something else to be uncertain about.

At this point, Hamlet has gone beyond his earlier need
to know the facts about the crime, and he now craves metaphysical
knowledge, knowledge of the afterlife and of God, before he is willing
to act. The audience has had plenty of opportunity to see that Hamlet is
fascinated with philosophical questions. In the case of the “to
be, or not to be” soliloquy, we saw that his philosophizing can
be a way for him to avoid thinking about or acknowledging something
more immediately important (in that case, his urge to kill himself).
Is Hamlet using his speculations about Claudius’s soul to avoid
thinking about something in this case? Perhaps the task he has set
for himself—killing another human being in cold blood—is too much
for him to face. Whatever it is, the audience may once again get
the sense that there is something more to Hamlet’s behavior than
meets the eye. That Shakespeare is able to convey this sense is
a remarkable achievement in itself, quite apart from how we try
to explain what Hamlet’s unacknowledged motives might be.